Election 2012: Will Florida Once Again Be a Rotten Banana?

Yes, I know Florida is known for its oranges, not bananas, yet "rotten orange" just doesn't have the same savoir faire, Nescafe pas?

Taking a stealth profile for this election season until making his caped-flourish last-minute entrance, Al Giordano presents his election results projection, with glad tidings for the blue squad (depending on GOTV, of course).

[A]fter carefully examining the polling, early voting and field organization numbers state-by-state, and daily interviews in recent weeks with people on the ground in the "swing states" (in order of Electoral Votes: Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa) and also the "faux-swing states" (those states that many in the media try to convince you are still up for grabs: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire), __The Field projects Obama to win tommorow with 318 Electoral Votes to 220 for__Romney.

This projection does not differ all that much from those generated by aggregating polling numbers and weighting them, with the exception that I'm projecting North Carolina for Obama while projecting a Romney win in Florida. (Caveat Emptor: Florida is the only state I've projected incorrectly twice in the last two presidential elections, and so it won't suprise me if I'm wrong about it, but I'll explain my logic here.)

So what makes Florida the spotted banana in the fruit bowl?

Florida, according to the aggregate of polls, is the closest of the swing states, with Romney having a 6-to-5 chance of winning and Obama at 5-to-6 underdog odds. Florida Governor Rick Scott and Republicans in the legislature severely curtailed early voting (limiting it to 96 hours in only eight days, compared to 120 hours in 14 days back in 2008) and the lines have been so long that many waited for hours and were still unable to cast a ballot.__So while in a fair fight, Obama's field organization would likely be able to overcome a modest disadvantage in the polls, Florida is not right now a fair contest. The vote is being stolen again as it was in 2000.__And it's likely to be close enough where that really makes the difference.

Al does see a shivering shimmer of hope in North Carolina, a state that some pundits in the last few days have been writing off as "slipping away" from Obama--the Obama ground game seems to have the edge.

I was interested in reading Al's take on Romney himself and his campaign machine. This is where Al's experience and tactical expertise come into play.

...I've known Mitt Romney up close since 1996 when he waged his first campaign, an unsuccessful one, against the late US Senator Ted Kennedy and I reported the battle for The Boston Phoenix. Willard Mitt Romney is a strange bird. He reminded me then of the fictional character Biff Howard Tannen from the 1985 motion picture Back to the Future: a dimwitted high school bully who made other kids do his homework for him (a Washington Post story earlier this year that looked at Romney's time in an elite prep school only confirmed that preconception, disclosing that Mitt had been an actual bully who wrestled another boy to the ground to forcibly cut his hair).

I reported a story, in '96, about how Romney, as Bishop of the Mormon church, tried to bully a young mother out of having an abortion while he was running for office in the Bay State as a supposed backer of a woman's right to choose. And I also reported how the Kennedy campaign completely overwhelmed Romney at the polls through a superior field organization that had been decades in the making. But not even that caused Romney to correct his mistake; not in the 2008 presidential primaries and not in those of 2012, when he utilized his larger bank account, and that of other billionnaires supposedly acting "independently," to squash one rival after another: Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum... none of those politicians had built even a half-decent field organization and thus were crushed, one at a time, by Romney's financial advantage. Romney, the governor's son, has always had a smirk on his face that suggested that he and he alone knew that it was his destiny to become president of the United States, and that his money would buy it for him.

Not just his money but all that Super-PAC Karl Rove Music Man money that's made the airwaves in the swing states a nonstop broadcast from hell.

Everybody's been following Nate the Silver Surfer this election cycle but I would suggest that you also bookmark Princeton Election Consortium, where Professor Sam Wang and Andrew Ferguson (not the Weekly Standard/Commentary writer, I hasten to add) have been doing stellar work this entire political season, with, as a bonus, just about the best commentators of any political site. Right now PEC projects Obama 318-Romney 228, but that may hop around a bit before we all go to sleep, assuming we don't lie awake all night WORRYING.

I'm probably going to watch a Korean soap opera via Netflix: I find them very appealing and pacifying.

[Update: Al just emailed me to mention that he's corrected a couple of things in his original projection and that PEC now also has Obama at 310: harmonic convergence!]